Hackweather

June 16th, 2007

Hackday took a very interesting turn this morning. In the middle of a presentation on Fire Eagle—the service that Tom has been trying to hard to keep mum about—the weather turned rather nasty outside. We could hear the rain hitting in the roof of Alexendra Palace and take comfort in the fact that we were snug and protected inside.

Then there was a loud bang. At first I thought that Yahoo and the BBC had gone overboard with the pyrotechnics budget but then I realised that the building had actually been struck by lightning. Okay, no big deal. But the lightning bolt did some damage to the palace’s “smart” system. Believing itself to be on fire, the building opened up its roof vents thus allowing the rain inside where it could pitter-patter down on the many laptops arrayed within. I blame Tantek.

An evacuation into the covered courtyard. Who knew that the first hack of the day would be trying to figure out how to hack Alexandra Palace?

It was actually kind of fun—stiff upper lip; spirit of the Blitz and all that, what what?

Now everything is back on track. The roof is closed. The WiFi is (mostly) up. Everybody’s hacking on something.

I’ve assembled a fairly large team that I’ve split into front-end and back-end factions. Natalie is overseeing the former and Gareth is handling the latter. It’ll be interesting to see whether anything emerges at the end of all this but it’s a heckuva lot of fun in any case.